human rights questions on his trip to Cuba Obama promises to raise

President Obama on Thursday promised to raise human rights concerns when he makes a legacy-defining visit to Cuba in March, as the White House tried to beat back Republican charges that the trip will hand an important symbolic victory to the authoritarian government in Havana.

“We still have differences with the Cuban government that I will raise directly. America will always stand for human rights around the world,” the White House announced on Obama’s official Twitter feed.

Obama had told Yahoo News in an exclusive interview in December that he could not imagine visiting Cuba without meeting face-to-face with advocates for political change, dissidents who experience regular harassment or worse from the authoritarian government in Havana.

“If I go on a visit, then part of the deal is that I get to talk to everybody,” Obama said at the time. “I’ve made very clear in my conversations directly with President [Raul] Castro that we would continue to reach out to those who want to broaden the scope for, you know, free expression inside of Cuba.”

Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters that the president would meet with dissidents during the March 21-22 trip, the first by a sitting American president since Calvin Coolidge steamed the 90 miles separating Florida and Cuba aboard a battleship. Rhodes said the administration had already warned the Castro regime that Obama would meet with some of its domestic critics.

“That doesn’t mean that we’re seeking to overthrow the Cuban government,” Rhodes said of the planned meetings. “It means that we’re seeking to support basic universal values that we would care about in any country.”

Rhodes acknowledged a deeply worrisome spike in arrests and harassment of dissidents and journalists in Cuba over the past year and promised “that’s an issue that we’ll be raising directly with the Cuban government.”

Magnets, including one showing an image of President Obama smelling a cigar, for sale at a tourist shop in Havana. (Photo: Ramon Espinosa/AP)Republicans denounced the planned trip. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, one of the two Cuban-Americans seeking the GOP’s presidential nomination in 2016, wrote a letter to Obama condemning it as “disastrous,” “dangerous” and “a mistake,” and pushed the president to cancel his announced visit.